Life In The Fast Lane Surely Make You Lose Your Mind

byMelisa WellsonJuly 30, 2015

It just hit me on Tuesday evening, right after I dropped Liz and her middle daughter off at the airport (how much I hate goodbyes could be a whole other post, ugh), how much I had done/accomplished/enjoyed in two weeks. It made me dizzy, and perhaps piled on more exhaustion, on top of my exhaustion. It also made me smile. The last two weeks of July just might have been the busiest two weeks of my entire life, but I’m not complaining. It was a blast.

First there was the BlogHer conference in NYC. I went into it exhausted; the weeks leading up to conference weekend are crazed for our entire staff. I slept on the plane, thank goodness, but we work hard and play hard all weekend so I kind of wish I had gotten about one thousand more hours of sleep before I arrived in Manhattan.

A post shared by SamanthaAmidon (@sam_planesandguac) on Jul 18, 2015 at 12:17pm PDT

In addition to working all day and being around many of my very favorite people in the universe 24/7, I was in the audience for excellent keynotes with the likes of Opal Tometti and Patrisse Cullors (two of the three #BlackLivesMatter movement founders), Melinda Gates (Co-founder, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), Soledad O’Brien (Chairman of Starfish Media Group), Anna Maria Chavez (Girl Scouts of America CEO, who I got to meet and who was just as friendly in person as she was on stage), Gwyneth Paltrow (Oscar-winning actress and founder of GOOP), Christy Turlington Burns (model and advocate), Brianna Wu (game developer) and Ava DuVernay (award-winning director). And those are just the “famous” people. We had some awesome 10X10 presentations by some spectacular speakers who aren’t known the world over but were no less dynamic.

At night, there were parties and other opportunities to hang out, the most epic being the McDonald’s closing party featuring Boyz II Men, DJ Spider, and Nick Cannon.

My inner circle and I were on the dance floor for three straight hours, can’t stop won’t stop.

On Sunday Liz and I dragged ourselves to Penn Station and took the train back to New Jersey where we had something to eat and then headed right for the beach. Monday she worked from home while I hung out with the kids, and then Tuesday she dropped Heather and me off at the airport so I could show her around Chicago and beyond.

Since I made a gorgeous, rainbow-colored Google doc to keep all of our plans straight, I have no trouble looking back and listing for you everything we did on her very first visit to Chicago (I couldn’t have remembered it all, otherwise!) Ready? Here we go:

Thursday
13. Roadtrip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin
14. Lunch at Cafe Benelux in Third Ward area
15. Shop in Third Ward (Milwaukee Public Market, West Elm, various others)
16. Roadtrip to Madison, Wisconsin
17. Check out the state capitol building
18. Walk up/down State Street, checking out shops
19. Hit the Union Terrace at UW-Madison; enjoy cold drinks in the hot sun while listening to live music that was a little more country than we prefer
20. Dinner with D, introduce Heather to fried cheese curds
21. Drive home same day

And that, all of that in two weeks, is why I’m working in my pajamas today, recharging my body and mind. I thrive on traveling and having big plans more than the average person, but I sure do love the balance of my day-to-day routine. Today it feels nice not to be running running running.

That said, if Liz and Heather told me they were hopping on a plane back to Chicago tonight, I’D BE ALL IN, grabbing my keys and sprinting to my car so I could pick them up again before I even finished this post.

It was an epic trip, but you missed the early morning swim on Monday, before the Pedway tour. It was totally spontaneous, which is why it wasn’t in your Google doc 🙂 Re-entry was hard…still is… man, but one of us needs to win the lottery or move closer to each other or…HEY!!!!… both of those things work for me! Miss you, sistuh ♡